Many world leaders or people of prominence are wary of eating anything on camera. The President of the United States is not allowed to be filmed eating on camera unless approved by the secret service.
> Many world leaders or people of prominence are wary of eating anything on camera.
Indeed.
No-one will ever let Ed Miliband, the then leader of the UK Labour Party in 2014, forget his unfortunate bacon sandwich moment. Hell, the event even has its own Wikipedia page:
We're truly doomed as a species if the image of someone eating a sandwich is the death of a politician's career and not all horrible shit politicians actually do.
Not trying to sound pernickity here but do you have a source on that? I find minor details like that really interesting and I couldn't think of good reasons why except PR, and if that was the only reason why would it be up to the secret service to decide? I tried Googling but couldn't find much.
There's no way the Secret Service could enforce that rule. Freedom of the press applies - the best they can do is avoid having the President eat in public.
I saw it quite a few times in reputable publications. I'm the last person to have a high opinion of the press's honesty, but multiple orgs lying about it would be a bizarre and easily-defeated conspiracy.
There's a scandal every month about some politician eating wrong -- whether it's them being too messy, or not messy enough. It's especially bad in UK politics.
There was furor over Trump wanting two scoops of ice cream instead of one[1]. I believe that in a post-Trump world, the American President will just never eat as far as the public knows. All meal-related meetings will be held behind closed doors, with not even a peep as to what was on the menu. All President-related meals will henceforth be national secrets revealed only to those with top security clearances. The White House kitchen will be treated with a similar secrecy as Area 51.
President will just never eat as far as the public knows
If the president never eats in public, how do we know they’re not a robot? This was a major plot point in the Asimov short story Evidence. The character went to extreme lengths to avoid being seen eating (and turned out to be a robot in the end).
Baby Alive has been able to eat since the early 1970s. Pretty sure robopresident could find a place to internally store consumed food until returning to its maintenance pod.
In the story above, the candidate is capable of eating (and does so in front of one of the roboticist main characters). She points out, as you do, that it would be trivial to store food internally for later disposal
How do you know anyone isn’t a robot who can fake eat?
This is the premise of the short story. The robot politician pretends to eat in order to trick his opponents who are trying to out him as a robot by proving he can’t eat.
Spoilers: they then try to trick the robot into violating the three laws of robotics. He ends up tricking his opponents by having another robot attack him, letting him freely defend himself when he otherwise wouldn’t be able to (since robots can’t harm humans).
It’s a fantastic story. Well worth the read. My description doesn’t do it justice.
I'm not sure what the flagged comment was, but this response implies that the president should be free to do anything, while we limit the press. That sounds backwards.
